Knoxville News-Sentinel, February 26, 2008: ‘Working poor’ increase
By Marti Davis
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
A growing number “first-timers,” mostly working families, are seeking emergency assistance from the Knoxville-Knox County Community Action Committee.
After a week or two of unpaid leave for illness or a family emergency, more people are finding their paychecks won’t cover the rent or the utility bills said Barbara Kelly, longtime director of CAC.
That trend Kelly noted is backed up in a statistical snapshot of Knox County that shows the area has a growing number of “working poor,” said Bingham Graves Pope, co-author of the study conducted by the University of Tennessee’s College of Social Work Office of Research and Public Service and commissioned by the United Way of Greater Knoxville.
“People can be doing everything right. They can have two jobs, they can be out there working themselves to death. They’re still just one paycheck, one diagnosis, one emergency away from disaster,” Pope told United Way officials and social service agency leaders at a Monday afternoon presentation of the study.
The U.S. Department of Labor defined the working poor as people who spent 27 weeks or more in the labor force during the year but whose incomes still fell below the official poverty level. Almost 60 percent of the working poor usually worked full time, 35 or more hours per week, the UT study states.
The UT study compared recent data on population, economics and health care to data from 1990 and 2000. The United Way hoped to see progress toward its mission of making more Knoxvillians “self-sufficient,” said Executive Director Ben Landers. But with working poor now added to those chronically dependant on social services, it’s hard to “make a dent” in the numbers, Pope explained.
“A lot of people in the middle are really scrambling just to try to hold their own,” she added.
No longer can a single breadwinner support most family households, the study found. As a result, more mothers of young children are going to work and many are working longer hours. More grandparents are helping out with child care, as well.
“We’ve morphed into an economy that assumes there are two adults working in every household,” Pope explained, backing that up with data that shows it takes two “per capita” incomes to equal the Knox County’s median “household income” of $44,000 in 2006.
For those families with just one working adult, the prospects are often grim.
One in three single female heads of household falls below the government-established poverty line.
Under government benchmarks, a family of four with an income of less than $20,000 is living in poverty; for a family of two, the limit is $13,200, Pope said.
The U.S. government benchmarks for “poverty” are extremely low and based on an outdated formula based on food prices, Pope explained.
As a result, many agencies are now serving families whose income is 125 percent to 200 percent of the government-formulated “poverty” level.
Few of the working poor qualify for help except in case of “emergencies.”
Their growing numbers may be related to Knox County’s growth in low-paying service-sector jobs, coupled with a loss in manufacturing and information-service jobs, Pope said.
Not all the news is bad. The number of single mothers in poverty fell below 30 percent for the first time in recent decades.
The number of blacks living in poverty fell to its lowest level on record, though three times as many blacks are living in poverty as are whites, Pope said.
The educational level of Knox Countians is increasing, albeit slowly, the study showed.
Marti Davis may be reached at 865-342-6305.